binary

Most of us are familiar with the term gaydar. It is the ‘intuitive’ ability to assess if someone is not straight. But then, there you have it. It implies that you can only be gay or straight. What about all of us bisexuals? What happens to us when someone erroneously assumes we are straight or gay? As Shiri Eisner points out in Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution: “Since our bisexuality is not ‘known’ to have any visual markers, we are routinely accused of fraudulence, perceived as invisible, and forced to deal with others’ doubts regarding our identities and our oppression.”

The terms ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ present a simplified and more palatable understanding of how the world works. In fact, the Western, minority world has a long-standing affinity for binaries – so much so that binarist ways of thinking and acting go unquestioned. Anthropologists have a term for this: ‘Doxa’ – the stuff that goes without saying. Good /bad; male/female; child/adult; life/death; straight/gay: are all binarist, seldom questioned, ways of making sense of the world. Anything in between, that doesn’t fall neatly into one or the other category, is feared and sometimes reviled.

As part of our Judeo-Christian heritage, we tend to divide everything into rigid categories of good and bad so often, we don’t give it much critical thought. For example, the male/female binary is left unquestioned, and it is assumed to be natural and inherent. Any person who falls outside that binary is a social outcast. Puberty, is another example of a liminal state of existence between childhood and adulthood, and as such is often scorned. Teenagers are depicted in Western culture as individuals who are caught between childhood and adulthood and are therefore unstable and dangerous. Those stages between life and death are rejected as unnatural and even repulsive because they defy our strict separation between those categories: life and death. States of being like depression and chronic illness that are between being fully alive and dead, are considered to be something to avoid at all costs.Continue reading →